Last week was relatively quiet in Ethereum land; the World Bank sold $33.8 million in another round of its private Ethereum blockchain bonds (not public chain activity but interesting nonetheless) and Mark Carney (Bank of England Governor) discussed the major advantages of a world reserve currency at an annual gathering of central bankers in Wyoming – drawing many parallels to that proposed by Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency.
Transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. Bitcoin was invented in 2008 by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto[15] and started in 2009[16] when its source code was released as open-source software.[7]:ch. 1 Bitcoins are created as a reward for a process known as mining. They can be exchanged for other currencies, products, and services.[17] Research produced by University of Cambridge estimates that in 2017, there were 2.9 to 5.8 million unique users using a cryptocurrency wallet, most of them using bitcoin.[18]